Justice Official Raps Busing, Affirmative-Action Programs

Advocates of mandatory student busing for desegregation and
affirmative action in hiring are guilty of "fighting discrimination
with discrimination," according to the Justice Department's principal
civil-rights enforcement official.

The Reagan Administration will continue to challenge such "remedies
of overreaction," said William Bradford Reynolds during a recent
address at Amherst College in western Massachusetts.

"If history taught us any lesson at all, it is that the use of race
to justify treating individuals differently--whether they be black or
white--can never be legitimate," said Mr. Reynolds, who holds the title
assistant attorney general for civil rights. "Regrettably, we have too
often disregarded that admonition, always with predictably dire
consequences."

According to Mr. Reynolds, the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark
decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Justices ordered
the desegregation of the Topeka, Kan., school system, "flatly and
unequivocally condemned" the practice of assigning children to schools
on the basis of race. That decision, he added, was substantially
bolstered by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"These judicial and legislative pronouncements reflected a national
consensus that racial classifications are wrong--and ought not to be
tolerated in any form or for any reason," Mr. Reynolds said. "[But]
that dream began to fade in the 1970's when the quest for equality of
opportunity gradually evolved into an insistence upon equality of
results."

"For those advancing this new thesis, numerical parity became the
watchword for equal opportunity," Mr. Reynolds said. "If a racial
preference will achieve the desired statistical result, its
discriminatory feature can be tolerated, we are told, as an unfortunate
but necessary consequence of remedying 'the effects of past
discrimination.'

"Thus, we come full circle: fighting discrimination with
discrimination, or--to put the argument in the terms of those who
advance it--using race 'in order to get beyond racism,"' he
continued.

A Judicial Obsession

The Court's acknowledgement in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board
of Education that mandatory student transportation was a justifiable
desegregation technique "evolved into nothing short of a judicial
obsession with the 'yellow school bus,"' Mr. Reynolds said.

"After more than a decade of court-ordered busing, the evidence is
overwhelming that the effort to desegregate through wholesale reliance
on race-conscious student-assignment plans has failed," he said. "The
destruction to public education wrought by mandatory busing is evident
in city after city."

"It is not difficult to understand why," Mr. Reynolds continued.
"The flight from urban public schools contributes to the erosion of the
municipal tax base, which in turn has a direct bearing on the growing
inability of many school systems to provide a quality public education
to their students--whether black or white. Similarly, the loss of
parental support and involvement--which often comes with the
abandonment of a neighborhood-school policy--has robbed many
public-school systems of a critical component of successful educational
programs."

As a consequence, he said, "the promise of Brown v. Board of
Education remains unfulfilled."

"[This Administration] will continue to challenge the remedies of
overreaction," Mr. Reynolds said. "Racial quotas in the workforce or
the schoolroom will not be sought, nor will they be accepted."

Instead, the Administration will promote programs "to expand
recruitment, to reach out and include those minorities who were
previously excluded, and then to judge all applicants on their
individual merit, without discrimination," he said.

"In education, the policy should be to expand educational
opportunities with special magnet schools and other devices and then to
allow all children to attend these or other schools regardless of race
or residence," Mr. Reynolds continued. "With this approach, the cruel
injustice of racial discrimination will be cured, not by imposing
burdens on innocent individuals because of color, but by reaching out
to all individuals and extending to them an enhanced measure of
opportunity and consideration based on merit."

In a related development, the Reagan Administration asked a federal
appeals court in Cincinnati last week to declare unconstitutional the
Detroit police department's affirmative-action promotion plan.

Promotion of Equal Numbers

Last March, a three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Sixth Circuit upheld the police department's plan, which requires
the promotion of equal numbers of blacks and whites to the rank of
lieutenant. The Justice Department asked the full court to rehear the
lawsuit and to declare the promotion policy unconstitutional because it
"impermissibly infringes on the equal-protection rights of nonblack
police sergeants."

The Administration's filing in the case marks the third time that it
has challenged the affirmative-action plans of local government
agencies. The Justice Department has become a party to similar cases
involving police officers and firefighters in New Orleans and
Boston.

Education officals have been monitoring the three cases closely
because their outcomes could have an effect on similar hiring plans for
teachers, administrators, and staff members.

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